Frontier’s overall performance of 1.1 exaflops translates to more than one quintillion floating point operations per second, or flops, as measured by the High-Performance Linpack Benchmark test. Each flop represents a possible calculation, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication or division.
Frontier’s early performance on the Linpack benchmark amounts to more than seven times that of Summit at 148.6 petaflops. Summit continues as an impressive, highly ranked workhorse machine for open science, listed at number four on the TOP500.
Frontier’s mixed-precision computing performance clocked in at roughly 6.88 exaflops, or more than 6.8 quintillion flops per second, as measured by the High-Performance Linpack-Accelerator Introspection, or HPL-AI, test. The HPL-AI test measures calculation speeds in the computing formats typically used by the machine-learning methods that drive advances in artificial intelligence.
Detailed simulations relied on by traditional HPC users to model such phenomena as cancer cells, supernovas, the coronavirus or the atomic structure of elements require 64-bit precision, a computationally demanding form of computing accuracy. Machine-learning algorithms typically require much less precision — sometimes as little as 32-, 24- or 16-bit accuracy — and can take advantage of special hardware in the graphic processing units, or GPUs, relied on by machines like Frontier to reach even faster speeds.
ORNL and its partners continue to execute the bring-up of Frontier on schedule. Next steps include continued testing and validation of the system, which remains on track for final acceptance and early science access later in 2022 and open for full science at the beginning of 2023.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
FACTS ABOUT FRONTIER
The Frontier supercomputer’s exascale performance is enabled by some of the world’s most advanced pieces of technology from HPE and AMD:
- Frontier has 74 HPE Cray EX supercomputer cabinets, which are purpose-built to support next-generation supercomputing performance and scale, once open for early science access.
- Each node contains one optimized EPYC™ processor and four AMD Instinct™ accelerators, for a total of more than 9,400 CPUs and more than 37,000 GPUs in the entire system. These nodes provide developers with easier capabilities to program their applications, due to the coherency enabled by the EPYC processors and Instinct accelerators.
- HPE Slingshot, the world’s only high-performance Ethernet fabric designed for next-generation HPC and AI solutions, including larger, data-intensive workloads, to address demands for higher speed and congestion control for applications to run smoothly and boost performance.
- An I/O subsystem from HPE that will come online this year to support Frontier and the OLCF. The I/O subsystem features an in-system storage layer and Orion, a Lustre-based enhanced center-wide file system that is also the world’s largest and fastest single parallel file system, based on the Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage system. The in-system storage layer will employ compute-node local storage devices connected via PCIe Gen4 links to provide peak read speeds of more than 75 terabytes per second, peak write speeds of more than 35 terabytes per second, and more than 15 billion random-read input/output operations per second. The Orion center-wide file system will provide around 700 petabytes of storage capacity and peak write speeds of 5 terabytes per second.
- As a next-generation supercomputing system and the world’s fastest for open science, Frontier is also energy-efficient, due to its liquid-cooled capabilities. This cooling system promotes a quieter datacenter by removing the need for a noisier, air-cooled system.
